1. Field of the Invention
This invention concerns sleeving for protecting elongated items.
2. Description of Related Art
Elongated items, such as wiring harnesses and optical fiber bundles, are often used in automotive, aerospace and marine environments where they are subjected to significant vibration. In automotive applications, wiring harnesses in particular are pernicious sources of unwanted “rattle noise” due to their propensity to resonate in response to structure borne vibration caused by engine operation or irregularities of the road surface over which the vehicle is passing. Wiring harnesses typically extend substantially throughout the vehicle's passenger compartment where they distribute power and control signals from the engine compartment to the dashboard instruments, interior lights, radio, speakers, electric windows, electric door locks, the window defogging element and on to the trunk to power the tail lights and often an electric fuel pump which may be positioned in the fuel tank. Although the harness is intermittently attached to the vehicle structure, the lengths of the harness between attachment points will often resonate and rattle against the structure in response to relatively low-frequency vibrations within the range of human hearing and provide a source of noise, which is both annoying and a cause of concern to the vehicle occupants. Aside from the noise annoyance, vibration of wiring harnesses will cause fatigue failures of the wiring, solder joints or mechanical connectors, leading to electrical malfunctions such as short circuits which could result in a vehicle fire.
Wiring harnesses are often wrapped with adhesive tape to protect and bundle them securely together. However, this process is labor intensive and consumes significant quantities of tape beyond what is reasonably necessary to protect the harness. Excessive tape consumption results from the taping process being a hand operation which is not executed with precision or reproduced reliably.